


Yo quería dejar, a mi amante

by witheredsong



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:43:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witheredsong/pseuds/witheredsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's an ordinary story. Until it is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yo quería dejar, a mi amante

1.“It’s all your fault, Jose”. His mama screams in the kitchen. Iker sits tense, the line of his back stiff, eyes dark, staring down sightlessly into his mathematics book, as his parents battle out his future in the kitchen.

 

A crumpled paper note hits him squarely on the face. He opens it, reads, “When you play for Real, I want a seat in the director’s box.” His brother looks on from the small balcony, suspiciously innocent. Iker grins, a quick quirk of his lips, even if his eyes are still worried.

 

“Football? What will football earn him? Will it put food on his table? Eh? He will be roaming the streets, begging, in a few years time.”

 

“He is mature. You yourself say he’s mature enough to make his own decisions. Let him try, why not?” his father’s soft voice counters. “It’s an ill-omened name. A visitation, my foot. Of plague.” His mother, punctuating her words with banging of pots and pans to underline her furious dismay.

 

Unai leans over his shoulder, uncharacteristically affectionate and drops another note on his lap. He twists his head to look at his brother, ruffles the carefully combed strands. Unai rolls his eyes and moves away with a huff. The note contains a stick drawing of presumably their mother, with LOCO underlined beneath it.

 

“He’s going for the trial. And that’s final.” His father. Iker’s heart skips a beat. A moment later Dad looks in, smiles conspiratorially at him. His hands clench around Unai’s note.

 

On the way to the trial, on the tube with his palms damp and slipping on the hand-rails, sweat sliding down his spine in a slow trickle, the sun is too bright. He closes his eyes and sees a field, each blade of grass alive beneath his feet, the roar of a thousand voices and sounds of running feet, a ball arcing, in a perfect arc in the air, and imagines himself diving, his fingers and the gloves covering them one and the same, meeting his fate, and then there is just a hush.

The young woman with the books is standing beside him, touches his shoulders, says, her voice sweet, “Isn’t this your destination?”

 

_Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire._

 

 

 

2\. He is fooling around, mostly bored, partly pre-occupied with the next game coming up, partly yearning for a chance to play in the first team. Art classes are a terrible waste of time, and his fingers, usually so expressive, seem to clamp when a drawing charcoal is put into them. The set-task, of sketching a bunch of weird looking vases and fruits and flowers on the teacher’s desk, seems impossible to complete. For one thing, both the rose in the vase and the orange in the bowl look like particularly malevolent gargoyles, inklings lurking on the frightened blanched page that is bearing the brunt of his artistic endeavours. Iker is busy making faces at his painting, straight black brows like particularly offended caterpillars crawling on his forehead, when he is surprised by Ms. Garcia. He has the apology on his lips when her expression robs him of his voice. She is almost shaking with excitement as she drags him to the principal’s office. Who is almost jumping around with joy. “Casillas, you are to go to the Bernabeau right now. Champion’s League, on the bench, only seventeen, imagine” jumbled words rush past his ear, a fire in his head, and he runs to his father in his battered Renault outside.

 

Just before he gets off at the training complex, jittery and exhilarated, his father wraps him in a bone crushing hug, kisses his forehead and says, “My son.”

 

A year later, it is the Champion’s League final against Leverkusen and he has been chosen to take Bodo’s place in the starting eleven. He is almost choking with nerves, but his hands are steady as he pulls on his gloves. 

 

 

3\. “So”. Iker turns to him and David is just a silhouette. “Vic wants me to accept the MLS offer”. Iker can’t see his eyes, and that voice is as calm as always, and he can’t read David at all. At all. But then, when has he been able to? “And Gaz wants me to come back home. To England”. An unnecessary clarification, because Iker knows Madrid is just a stopover for David fucking Beckham. Always was. David the motherfucking migratory bird.

 

Iker wants to ask him, but where do you want to be David? He doesn’t. David does what others want him to, be what others want him to be, will always be the golden dream everyone wants to dream of. And David stumps him with the question, “What do you want Iker?”

 

You. You. Is all he can think, but will never say. Who is David to him, but that dream? He’s dreamed David, like everyone else, and there David is, his David, but surely not anything that is real. One cannot hold and touch and taste a dream forever and one always awakes with empty arms. He is dumbly looking down into the glass of red wine he holds, when two gentle fingers tilt his chin up, up until he is staring into David’s calm serious eyes, mouth a thin line.

 

“Say something,” and there is a hint of fierce entreaty in David’s voice. But the moment passes and David flashes that crooked tilted smile. “You never will, will you? Too much goddamned pride. I won’t beg Iker.” He kisses Iker’s forehead, the lips cool and dry on his eyebrows and it hurts worse than any reckless tackle, any twisted limbs, any unsaved goals. He looks up and smiles at David, but he can’t know, doesn’t know how savage he looks, how young and raw.

 

In front of them, the flamenco performance is nearing its end, the passion, the dark violence of love, the destruction enacted by lovely wild women with their hair of midnight and flowered combs, the high castanets clicking in a tempest of stamping, the bar nondescript, smoky. So Spanish, so cliché. Home. David’s hand smoothes slowly down his back, and he feels breathless as the woman whose voice accompanies the dancers sings heartbreak and betrayal:

 

Yo quería dejar

A mi amante,

Pero antes de que pudiera,

Hacerlo ella me abandonó

Y destrozó mi corazón. *

 

It’s all too much to bear; he’s not himself, not Saint Iker, not Madrid’s last hope, not Spain’s hero. He’s just 25 and he has never learnt to give up, learnt to let go, has he? He stands up suddenly so that David’s hand drops off his back and David wears this strange startled look. He tries to say something to David, but goodbyes are so hard and that’s it. He walks, stumbles outside, the song echoing in his ears until he’s dizzy and can’t see well, somehow gets into his car and rests his head on the steering wheel, fingers clenched white. The soft streetlight shine through the windows, the street is empty, muted sounds of the bar filtering through. He is nauseous and feverish and he thinks 

_I was content in my isolation and my duties and my shoulders were strong and young and wide enough. What is the life of a saint but a social life?_

_I had forgotten what it was like to be happy. But you came, you came and reminded me and now, I don’t know how to go back, reassemble my mask of gold …._


End file.
